Capital Preparatory Magnet School permitted 116 students to enroll over a two-year span without winning seats through the normal lottery process, state auditors said Thursday in a report that criticized state education officials for failing to discover and halt the practice.

Those students accounted for one of every three students admitted during the 2013-14 and 2014-15 years that were analyzed in the audit. The state Department of Education reported a day earlier that its own review found an additional 15 Capital Prep students who were admitted outside the typical blind lottery process during the 2015-16 school year.

Capital Prep is the most popular magnet school in Hartford, drawing the most applicants and leaving the greatest number of children on waitlists.

The state auditors examined magnet-school admissions in the context of the Sheff v. O'Neill desegregation lawsuit that led to a network of nationally touted schools in the Hartford area. For years, the state had insisted that all enrollment decisions were random, spit out through a computerized lottery system that keeps thousands of families in suspense every spring.

Not winning a seat can mean languishing in a struggling Hartford neighborhood school with low test scores and high needs. And despite those high stakes, the auditors said the state had failed to institute enough controls to detect fraudulent admissions to the highly sought-after schools.

"Enrollment of students to magnet schools outside the lottery violates the Sheff agreement," the auditors wrote, "and increases the risk for fraud regarding the enrollment of exceptional athletes, who improve the image of the school; high achieving students, who disproportionately improve the school's average test scores; and preschoolers, who thereby reduce a family's costs for childcare."

Prekindergarten for children as young as 3 is free at Sheff magnet schools — a feature popular with suburban families.

The audit was released a day after The Courant reported that at least 10 athletes, going back as far as 2010, either bypassed the Capital Prep lottery or were ensured seats regardless of the lottery's outcome. Although the audit refers to the potential for selecting students on the basis of athletic or academic ability, the auditors did not identify the motive for accepting any individual student outside the state-run lottery.

Of the 116 Capital Prep students who were not enrolled through the random lottery process, 55 had no lottery application on file and 48 appeared to leapfrog over students who were next on the waitlist, the auditors found. Thirteen won seats at another magnet school but ended up at Capital Prep, or missed the deadline for accepting a seat at Capital Prep, but were admitted anyway.

The auditors also said 12 students were improperly enrolled at three other Hartford magnet schools during the 2014-15 school year — five at Breakthrough II, five at Betances Early Reading Lab and two at Betances STEM Magnet school.

The Sheff Movement, a coalition that supports integrated education and the Sheff case, said in a statement Thursday that it was "alarmed to learn of reported irregularities in the magnet school lottery — such actions run contrary to the values of equity and opportunity for all children upon which the magnet school system was founded, and placement outside of its lottery guidelines is unacceptable."

The state's annual school-choice lottery is expected to be held as soon as next week, and Sheff advocates said they were worried that the disclosures could cast doubt on a magnet system that has been praised as one of the best integration efforts in the United States. As a result of improper admissions, the auditors wrote, "the goals of the Sheff settlement to reduce economic, racial, and ethnic isolation may not be achieved."

The Sheff Movement called on state and city school officials to be more transparent on enrollment practices "to ensure that all students who wish to attend a high-quality magnet school are afforded the fair chance to do so."

"Thousands of Hartford and suburban families rely on the fundamental fairness of the lottery process, and all parties should do everything possible to ensure its integrity," the group said.

As part of a nearly decade-old settlement pact between the Sheff plaintiffs and the state, Greater Hartford's magnet schools are considered integrated if at least a quarter of their students are not black or Latino. Capital Prep met that standard during 2013-14, the same academic year in which auditors said that 71 students — 44 percent of those newly enrolled — were admitted outside the lottery process.

Since then, however, the school's share of white and Asian students has declined dramatically and is now down to 16.6 percent, putting Capital Prep far out of compliance with integration goals.

Hours after the auditor's report was published online, Hartford school officials on Thursday afternoon refused to comment on Capital Prep's admissions practices or the other enrollment findings that indicated a pattern of lax oversight.

"This is an audit of the state's record-keeping operations," said Pedro Zayas, a spokesman for the district. "This is not an audit of Hartford Public Schools."

Capital Prep is part of the city public school system.

Zayas added that the district was reviewing internal records to see if they match the state's conclusions. "We need to go through lawyers, we need to go through our documents, compare them to the state's documents," he said.

The auditor's examination of the lottery, which began more than two years ago after a complaint involving one student's acceptance into a magnet school, prompted the state Department of Education to analyze the enrollment of every magnet student admitted in the region this school year.

The department's review found that 41 students were improperly enrolled throughout the Sheff network. Among those were 33 students for which the state made tuition payments — hundreds of thousands of dollars that the state plans to deduct from the schools. The other eight were Hartford residents attending Hartford schools, according to Abbe Smith, a state education spokeswoman.

"I think 33 sounds like a lot," said Martha Stone, a longtime lawyer for the Sheff plaintiffs, before the state later clarified that the total number was 41 for the 2016-17 year. Statistically, a few dozen exceptions to the lottery rules might seem "negligible" when compared to the thousands of students who legitimately win seats every year, she said.

But Stone believes those lottery exceptions should be rare and on humanitarian grounds, such as child-welfare cases in which a student may have left a magnet school to be placed with a foster family, but later wanted to return to the school.

"In order for families to have confidence, you have to have a blind lottery that's accurate, that's true, that's consistent, that has no fraud, no flaws attached to it," said Stone, who asked the state to release the circumstances of the cases it identified. "We can't have families lose confidence in the lottery system."

Schools found to have enrolled at least one student outside the lottery this year included seven acclaimed schools run by Hartford Public Schools: Breakthrough Magnet, Hartford Pre-K Magnet, Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy, Noah Webster MicroSociety, Pathways Academy of Technology & Design, Sport and Medical Sciences Academy, and University High School of Science and Engineering.

The Capitol Region Education Council, an education agency in Hartford that also runs Sheff magnet schools in the area, had four schools on the state's list: the full-day Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, Metropolitan Learning Center, Museum Academy and Public Safety Academy. And there were two schools run by other magnet operators: East Hartford's Connecticut IB Academy and Bloomfield's Global Experience Magnet School.

Overall, at least 175 students at area magnet schools — mostly at Capital Prep — have been identified as winning seats outside the normal enrollment process in recent years.

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The revelations have roiled parents and educators, as well as former student-athletes at Capital Prep who expressed fears on social media that the admissions controversy could strip away their state championship wins in football and girls basketball.

But officials with the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference decided Thursday afternoon that there would be no immediate investigation of the school, and even if there is a future inquiry, the association will not retroactively invalidate the school's wins.

The championships have been part of Capital Prep's winning persona. Over the years, Capital Prep founder and former principal Steve Perry has made repeated claims that the student body was randomly chosen.

"We have a lottery. We DO NOT hand pick our students," he posted on Twitter in 2012.

Capital Prep officials now say the school was allowed to handpick students. The school points to a provision in its operations plan that states: "In special circumstances the Board extends the opportunity to the principal to place a student" — an apparent reference to the school's Governance Committee.

Perry and current Capital Prep Principal Kitsia Hughey Ferguson did not respond to requests for comment on the audit. But the school, which has a social-justice theme, issued a statement on its website Thursday that included a link to the auditors' report.

"While maintaining our core of social justice, it is imperative that our Capital Prep families, alumni and supporters understand the full context of recent allegations," the statement reads. "We are confident that as you read through the report, you will find that Capital Prep functions within the guidelines of its state approved ... operational plan."

But auditors said the enrollment provision "violates the contractual agreement" between the state and Hartford schools that requires all Sheff magnet schools to use the blind lottery process as the sole means of admission. The report noted that the clause cited by Capital Prep appears in none of the other 17 magnet-school operations plans that investigators reviewed.

"We were unable to determine why the Capital Prep operational plan included language that appeared to give them a unique opportunity to place students outside the lottery," the auditors wrote.

State education officials have also rejected Capital Prep's claim it had discretion to pick students, and last year docked about $200,000 from the school's budget — their way of retrieving tuition grants the state paid out for the 15 students deemed to have been improperly enrolled at the school in 2015-16.

The state says it will also impose financial penalties on magnet schools that improperly enrolled students during the current school year. And going forward, the education department will audit every student newly enrolled in a Sheff magnet school, and will withhold funding for any admitted outside the lottery, said Smith, the department spokeswoman.

The auditors criticized the state Department of Education's "lack of administrative oversight" of magnet schools. The report called on the department to establish internal controls "designed to detect and prevent fraud" in the lottery, and said the state should only pay for students who are verified to have been admitted through the random selection process.

Hartford school board member Robert Cotto Jr., the director of Urban Educational Initiatives at Trinity College, said Capital Prep's past admissions practice "shows a huge problem," but cautioned against assigning wider blame to the Sheff system.

"There needs to be some fixes," Cotto said. "But this isn't a reflection of desegregation programs or magnet schools in general."